How to Money · Friday, July 31, 2026
Joel and Matt argue that the popular financial advice to 'skip the latte' or avocado toast is a misguided focus on small expenses. They contend that larger budget items, like car payments or meal delivery services, offer more significant savings potential and are better targets for financial optimization.
“And one of the popular lines of advice is skip the latte, skip the avocado toast. This is, I mean, honestly, it's barn on one of the pieces of advice I hate the most. And it's not that spending too much money at your local coffee shop like that, it's not possible. It definitely is.”
“And yet we're kind of digressing herealking about the latte factor. But folks, and in particular media, I think it's just picked one of the loveliest spots that's often the like a cornerstone of community hangs. It just seems like the coffee shop has kind of gotten a bad rap maybe this is on my mind, Joel, because this morning you and I w went and got a coffee before our morning meeting.”
“For some reason, we've singled out coffee shops. It's wrong, it needs to stop. But speaking of those just a right, that's right, those bigger ticket items, though, you have bigger fish to fry. So when you spend an inordinate amount of your time thinking about these tiny little ways that you could potentially eke out a few more bucks, I'm not saying I don't think either of us would say, Matt, that that's time poorly spent, but we would say you might be hogging valuable mental bandwidth that could be spent on those bigger ticket items where you could be getting a bigger ROI by looking elsewhere.”